Rafsanjani's Return?

The Economist:

Three months short of polling day, he is easily the most discussed of Iran's presidential hopefuls. He speaks, he claims, “for the whole system”, and is supported by many bureaucrats and pro-market economists. He clearly longs to return to the office that he occupied between 1989 and 1997, before he gave way to reform-minded Muhammad Khatami, who stands down after elections in June. So why does Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, at 71 as feline and inscrutable as ever, refuse formally to join the fray? read more

Mr Rafsanjani purrs that he is waiting for younger men to come forward who could do a good job. His expected rivals include half-a-dozen hardline conservatives, besides staunch reformists who will probably be barred from standing by Iran's conservative vetting body. A more important stay on Mr Rafsanjani's ambitions, say associates, is that he has not received the go-ahead from his old friend and rival, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Without Mr Khamenei's unofficial endorsement, Mr Rafsanjani's campaign might come unstuck. Members of his entourage could be prey to long-threatened corruption probes; his opponents talk of solving the dozens of extra-judicial executions that happened during his watch.

The supreme leader's silence reflects a dilemma. Mr Khamenei is less sympathetic to Mr Rafsanjani's reform-tinted pragmatism than he is to the ideological rigidity being extolled by most of the other presidential wannabes. But Mr Rafsanjani has two things that his rivals have not: international standing and the authority to guide the country through a crisis.

Under pressure for developing a nuclear programme that America, the Europeans and others suspect of being military in intent, the Iranians have suspended their uranium-enrichment activities pending agreement with their French, British and German negotiating partners on “objective guarantees” that the programme will not be diverted to military use.

Iran rejects the Europeans' favoured option that it abandon its longstanding efforts to produce nuclear fuel. The best that some Europeans nowadays hope for is an indefinite extension of Iran's current suspension of fuel-cycle activities. This seems a bit more likely now that George Bush is considering offering modest inducements: allowing the sale of spare parts for ageing airliners and the lifting of America's veto on Iran's accession talks with the World Trade Organisation have been mooted. Though Iran's leaders make much of their citizens' keenness to have a fuel cycle, this keenness, ascertained through opinion polls of dubious methodology, is probably false.

Enter Mr Rafsanjani, the best-known Iranian proponent of a “grand bargain” aimed at normalising relations and ending American sanctions. He is aware that most Iranians are fed up with official hostility to America, and that importers chafe at having to buy capital goods from the exorbitant euro zone. But his sensitivity to public opinion is both a strength and a failing.

Mr Rafsanjani's ideological flexibility makes him the ideal man to come to terms with the “Great Satan”—but that makes him suspect in the eyes of the Iranian establishment. Even if he does come to power, he may not have a free rein.

The European elite love Rafsanjani convincing themselves that he is a "realist" much like themselves. Rafsanjani is corrupt, unpopular anything but a moderate as illustrated by his call to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons.